The Ohu System of Slavery in a Northern Ibo Village-group

Abstract

Opening ParagraphThe village-group of Nike occupies an area of some 200 square miles to the immediate north-east of Enugu, capital of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. It comprises 24 villages with a total population of 9,600, a figure which gives the average density of the group as 48 per square mile—one of the lowest in Ibo country.Traditions in neighbouring groups, as well as in Nike itself, affirm that before the advent of the British Administration the people of Nike were the principal slave-traders in northern Ibo-land. The first mention of the group in the history of colonial Nigeria appears in an account submitted by the Assistant District Officer, Obubra, of some exploratory journeys undertaken amongst the northern Ibo in the year 1905. Remarking, with the true empire-builder's sang-froid, that ‘the whole area seems relatively quiet and well-disposed…cannibalism and human sacrifice are more or less general’, the officer encloses an interesting sketch-map of the north-eastern section of Ibo-land which shows the Nike group to have been the main trading cross-roads of the whole of this area.